Two months after US-led troops invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, a group of armed men abducted fifteen-year-old Muna B. and her two sisters while they were walking to a market near their home in the port city of Basra. The men jumped out of a taxi next to the three sisters, covered the eyes and mouths of the terrified girls, and whisked them away.
Muna later told Johanna Bjorken, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, that the men held her and her sisters, ages eleven and sixteen, at a house with seven other young children, ages six to fourteen. On the first day of the girls’ arrival, one of the men whipped the children with a plastic hose to punish them for crying. The next day, the men separated Muna from her sisters and put her in a room alone. It was during this time she heard them rape her older sister. “They did bad things to my sister,” she later recalled. “They beat her, and they did bad things. One night, I heard her shouting, and then a week later, they brought her to me, but only for one hour. She told me that they had slept with her; she was crying. She only told me about that one night, but she said that all [four men] did it.”
On several occasions, the men brought other people who looked the children over, the way one might examine a cow at a cattle market. Muna believed them to be traffickers who were going to bid on children:
“They brought in people they wanted to sell us to. They would bring men, they would look at us, and then bargain, negotiate a price. One was a fat woman wearing a veil, and another time two men came. They bargained and negotiated the prices, they would talk and laugh but not let us know, the [buyers] would ask how much, and then [the captors] would wink their eyes and say, ‘Don’t talk now, in front of them.’ … Then they would talk to us, saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make you happy, we’ll give you a happy life, don’t worry, don’t cry.’ … I think they wanted us to be dancers or something like that, they told us that.”
The last “buyer” came in early June 2003. He returned the following day with another man. Convinced that she and her sisters would be sold to these men, Muna managed to escape when her captors left to get food for breakfast. She ran through fields for about fifteen minutes until she reached a road, then flagged down a car that took her to Baghdad, where she eventually made her way to US soldiers who took her to a police station. When Human Rights Watch spoke to Muna on June 13, she had not seen her sisters since her escape and feared that they were still in captivity or that they had been sold.
Although Muna managed to escape her captors, there would be no fleeing the trauma and stigma of her abduction. For the women and girls caught in the wave of sexual violence and abductions that spread through Iraq in the months after the invasion, informing a male family member about an attack could have potentially exposed them to additional violence as punishment for their “transgression.” The war meant there was limited access to adequate health care. Even with the assistance of US military police officers who tried for two days to organize medical attention for Muna, three hospitals refused to examine her. She wanted a forensic examination to document her assertion that she had not been raped, because she feared that her family might kill her if she returned home without proof that her virginity was still intact. In Iraq, such “honor killings” were not uncommon.
The complete breakdown in the policing and security system as a result of the invasion created additional hardship for girls and women brave enough to buck cultural norms and turn to the authorities for protection. Overwhelmed and undertrained police and security officers frequently did not appear to recognize, or purposefully downplayed, the seriousness of allegations of sexual violence and abductions in the months following the invasion. When Human Rights Watch inquired about Muna’s case, Iraqi police at the station referred to her as “the girl who ran away from home.” Muna said that while Iraqi police and USU military police were present when she gave her statement, the Iraqi police did not seem interested in her case. “The Iraqis didn’t write anything down. The Iraqis said, ‘It is not up to us, we have nothing to do with your case.’ They said that the ‘Americans are handling it.’ ” Police officers at the station confirmed that they did not open an investigation, claiming that it was not within their geographical jurisdiction; however, they failed to refer the case to Iraqi police officers in the relevant district.
Although Saddam Hussein’s official army had been easily defeated by the US-led forces in 2003, on the streets of Iraq a series of conflicts was still unfolding, including one that would be waged against women and their rights for years to come. The resulting chaos of the US invasion, followed by sectarian strife that engulfed the country, has exacted an enormous toll on Iraqi women and girls, who are now still worse off, in many respects, than before 2003.
The collapse of Iraq’s security promoted a rise in tribal customs and religiously inflected political extremism, which have had a deleterious effect on women’s rights, both inside and outside their homes. In the decades prior to the first Gulf War of 1990-91, Iraqi women surprisingly enjoyed some of the highest levels of rights protection and social participation in the region. For these women, the steady erosion of this status has been a heavy blow.
As a result of the invasion and subsequent lack of security, armed groups proliferated across Iraq and continue to this day to target female political and community leaders and activists. The threat of violence has had a debilitating impact on the daily lives of women and girls, and has reduced their participation in public life. It has also adversely affected their professional lives, as many female doctors, journalists, activists, engineers, politicians, teachers, and civil servants have quit their jobs out of fear for their safety.
In the spring of 2010, while conducting research for a Human Rights Watch report on the eight-year anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion, I interviewed a women’s rights activist who led public campaigns against domestic violence and other women’s issues in the city of Najaf, south of Baghdad. She told me she had started to receive numerous death threats via text messages starting in August 2007. The messages were variations on the same theme: “Oh, you bitch, stop your work or we will kill you.” This activist was well known because she published articles in her own name. In September 2007, assailants bombed her house, damaging it and twelve others in the neighborhood. She continued to receive threats in the weeks following the explosion.
This woman explained that the police took some photos of the wreckage but did not follow up with a proper investigation, so she tried to pursue the case on her own by hiring a private investigator to determine who was sending her the threatening text messages. She described her predicament: “The police did not do anything to help us or investigate the attack because the perpetrators were extremists and they were afraid. All the police would tell us is, ‘You’re lucky to still be alive.’ ”
On November 12, 2009, an assailant shot Safa ’Abd al-Amir, the principal of a girls’ school in Baghdad, four times. The attack happened shortly after she announced that she was running in the national elections as a Communist Party candidate. After al-Amir left her school in the al-Ghadir district at about 1:30 p.m., a maroon-colored BMW approached her vehicle from behind to the side; an assailant shot her three times in the face and once in the arm. She did not immediately realize what had happened to her because the gunman used a silencer. Despite her injuries, al-Amir managed to leave her car and walk barefoot for about sixty feet. When police arrived at the scene, they initially feared she was a suicide bomber because she was drenched in blood. “I couldn’t answer the questions because they had shot my mouth—I just kept pointing to my mouth,” al-Amir later related to me.
After numerous operations, including one to reconstruct her jaw, she was still undergoing treatment when I met her in April 2010. “They tried to kill me because I’m a political woman,” she said. “According to the extremists’ beliefs, an unveiled progressive woman running for political office sets a bad example for other women.” She said the police conducted a superficial investigation, which comprised only obtaining her statement in response to a few questions and no follow-up. She said the police either did not care or were afraid to investigate. Authorities have made no arrests in the case.
As the Arab Spring unfolded across the Middle East in early 2011, protesters and activists in Iraq, including women, were increasingly targeted as they took to the streets calling for an end to a chronic lack of basic services and widespread corruption. Even though Iraq was by then considered to be a democracy, its leaders still reacted to these protests in much the same way as their despotic counterparts around the region: with violence and repression. Security forces and their proxies were equal-opportunity abusers in dealing with protesters; however, armed assailants used particularly degrading methods to silence some women who dared to speak out.
At a protest in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on June 10, 2011, groups of government-backed thugs armed with wooden planks, knives, iron pipes, and other weapons beat and stabbed peaceful protesters. During the attack, the assailants beat and groped female demonstrators, and in some cases attempted to remove their clothing. They taunted them, calling the women whores and other sexually degrading terms.
Among the female demonstrators who were sexually attacked was a nineteen-year-old who, the following day, showed Human Rights Watch the swelling in her mouth around a broken tooth, and bruises on her abdomen. She said she was groped by several men, who forced their hands into her pants: “I saw that those who were yelling at us started attacking a woman from our group. I tried to get to her, but I was pulled down to the ground and was then being hit, mostly in my stomach. I tried to get up, but I got hit in the face, and my tooth was broken. I fell back to the ground and was still being hit, and they restrained my hands. One of them unzipped my pants and tried to pull them off. I was kicking and trying to free myself. They called me a whore and yelled that they were going to make an example of me, so others wouldn’t come to demonstrate. I felt that I was going to be raped, from what they were doing.”
Another female protester told Human Rights Watch: “Not long after we arrived, many people surrounded us. Some men behind me were touching me all over, and put their hands under my clothes. I tried to stop someone who was doing this, and he grabbed my wrist and pulled my hands back. While they were holding me, they yelled that I was a whore and asked how much I charged to do sexual acts. I know the army could see us from where we were, because I made eye contact with them.”
In Basra, lawlessness and Iraqi militia activity escalated in September 2007 after British forces withdrew their troops from Basra Palace, one of Saddam Hussein’s former residences, and moved them to the airport on the outskirts of the city. Until the Iraqi army’s “Charge of the Knights” operation in Basra in March 2008, militias terrorized women in the city, according to women’s rights activists and news reports. In 2007 alone, vigilantes reportedly killed 133 women, claiming religious or customary sanction. According to Basra security forces, extremists deemed 79 of the victims to be “violating Islamic teachings.” Some 47 other women died in “honor killings,” and 7 were targeted for their political affiliations.
In April 2010, I interviewed Major-General Abd al-Jalil Khalaf, who was sent to Basra in June 2007 as the city’s chief of police. He told me that extremists were in complete control of the city and that none of them have been held accountable for the crimes they committed. His words were chilling:
“The ages of women who were murdered ranged anywhere from fourteen years to sixty. Before the women were killed, they were tortured and sometimes had their teeth or eyes extracted. The corpses had bruises all over their bodies. Some had their breasts cut off or arms amputated, and their hair was shaven off. Most of the victims had terrified looks frozen on their faces. And none of their families came to collect the bodies. Not only did the police not investigate these crimes, my officers were directly implicated in some of the killings since the militia had infiltrated the police force.… These men, who committed such atrocious acts, cannot be considered human.”
Since the 2003 invasion, widespread insecurity, displacement, financial hardship, social disintegration, and the dissolution of the rule of law and state authority have all contributed to an increase in trafficking and forced prostitution. There are no official statistics or estimates regarding the number of women who are trafficked within the country or internationally, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the major destination points are Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf countries. According to some women activists, the number of victims is at least in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Traffickers transport their victims overseas by land, sea, or air mainly out of Baghdad and Basra by different mechanisms. In some cases, women are forced into prostitution through false promises of legitimate employment overseas. These women realize they are duped only after they arrive at their destination country and their traffickers confiscate their passports. Traffickers also transport women and girls internally and internationally through arranged and forced marriages. Families marry off their young women and girls to older men from outside their community who are either agents or brokers. Often the girl’s family coerces her into marriage, hoping to escape desperate economic circumstances or to pay debts. Other times families are unaware of the fate that awaits their daughters. “These rich foreigners come, who seem normal and look respectable, and it turns out not to be the case but the families only find out later,” said one women’s rights activist in Basra. “Many of these poor girls who think they are escaping their hard life in Iraq end up in Syria dancing in nightclubs.”
Typically, after the broker or agent takes his “wife” or “wives” to a destination point, he divorces the woman, sells her, and returns to Iraq to claim new victims. The younger the girl, the more lucrative the profits. The highest demand is for girls under sixteen. Traffickers reportedly sell girls as young as eleven and twelve, for as much as $30,000, while older “used” girls and women can be bought for as little as $2,000. The traffickers are aided by sophisticated criminal networks that are able to forge documents and pay corrupt officials to remove impediments.
Iraq’s government has done little to combat trafficking in girls and women: there have been no successful prosecutions of criminals engaged in human trafficking, no comprehensive program to tackle the problem, and negligible support for victims.
Instead of helping victims, women’s rights groups say that trafficked women (and victims of sexual violence) often find themselves in jail. The government provides no assistance to victims repatriated from abroad, and Iraqi authorities prosecute and convict trafficking victims for unlawful acts committed as a result of being trafficked; for example, some victims who were trafficked abroad using false documents were arrested and prosecuted upon their return to Iraq.
Apart from document and passport fraud, victims are also jailed for prostitution, while authorities ignore their abusers.
In some cases, women and girls request to remain in detention centers even after a sentence is complete, fearful that their families will kill them. One fourteen-year-old girl originally from Rania, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, told Human Rights Watch in June 2010 that she ran away from home to Arbil, the region’s capital, after her parents forced her to become engaged to a cousin. In Arbil, out of desperation, she accepted money and accommodation from a man in exchange for sex. An Arbil court convicted her of prostitution and gave her a six-month sentence. When authorities released her to a shelter because of her age, she insisted on staying in the prison. She said she considered the prison more secure. Seven months after her initial arrest, she says she does not know what to do: “My father says that he will kill me if he ever sees me.”
Victims of sexual violence and trafficking have well grounded fears of reprisals, social ostracism, rejection, or physical violence from their families, and a lack of confidence that authorities have the will or capacity to provide the support or protection required. Police are generally reluctant to investigate cases of sexual violence, trafficking, and abductions. Policing in Iraq is almost exclusively a male profession, and officers give low priority to allegations of sexual violence and trafficking compared with other crimes, such as murder and theft. Women’s groups complain that, too often, police blame the victim, doubt her credibility, show indifference, and conduct inadequate investigations. For these reasons, many women are reluctant to file a complaint.
Domestic violence has always been a problem in Iraq, but women’s rights groups say that years of armed conflict and economic hardships have contributed to increased violence within families. The proliferation of weapons has also intensified domestic violence and increased the risks of serious injury or death for women and girls. This issue has not received the attention it deserves, women’s groups say. “In conflict areas, women’s issues are never a priority,” one human rights defender in Baghdad told me in 2010. “Who wants to talk about domestic violence when violence is everywhere and people are dying on the streets?”
According to a female lawyer and women’s advocate from Qurna, the economic situation is forcing women to stay in dysfunctional or abusive relationships out of necessity. “If they don’t, who will provide for them or their children? So accepting domestic violence is preferable to being poor.”
Social attitudes that stigmatize female divorcees also help keep women in abusive relationships. According to a 2008 World Health Organization survey on family health in Iraq, 83 percent of married Iraqi women interviewed said they were subjected to “controlling behavior” by their husbands, including insisting on knowing where they were at all times, and 21 percent reported physical violence. In a 2003 study in southern Iraq by Physicians for Human Rights, more than half of the surveyed women and men agreed that a husband has the right to beat a disobedient wife.
This level of violence within marriage is underpinned by Iraqi legislation. Iraq’s penal code effectively condones domestic violence under Article 41(1). The “punishment of a wife by her husband” is considered a legal right on par with disciplining children, according to the text of the provision. While the penal code specifies that such punishment is permissible “within certain limits prescribed by law or by custom,” there are no specified legal limits. According to a lawyer in Najaf who provides legal assistance to women’s groups, it is “very difficult” to take any legal action against men who abuse their wives. If the woman does not show marks or scars from abuse, the case is automatically rejected.
The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates there are between 1 million and 3 million female-headed households in Iraq as a result of decades of war and violence. Traditionally, a widow in Iraq would return to her family or in-laws after the death of her husband, but increasingly families are unable to provide any help. Without their husbands or support from their families, these widows become socially isolated and desperate for ways to support their children.
The Iraqi government has developed a social welfare program, which includes pensions for widows amounting to 50,000 to 120,000 dinars (US$43 to $102), according to the number of dependent children. Widows are also entitled to additional compensation of up to 2.5 million dinars (US$2,100) for a spouse killed because of “terrorism.”
Aid experts have said the allowance is insufficient, especially for rural widows who typically have more children and fewer sources of income than urban widows. A 2010 survey by the International Organization for Migration found that 74 percent of 1,355 female-headed displaced families who have returned to their places of origin are struggling to secure adequate nutrition for their families.
Many widows do not receive an allowance because of corruption and government institutions’ lack of capacity to reach rural areas. Others, lacking education and documents, do not even bother applying because the process is overly complex and requires excessive amounts of documentation. A 2008 survey conducted by the ICRC in cooperation with a local NGO in one district of Baghdad found that only 10 percent of eligible widows received a widow’s pension. Another survey conducted by Oxfam and the Iraqi NGO Al-Amal in five governorates across the country showed that 76 percent of widows did not get any government pension.
Because of the extreme financial pressures on displaced and female-headed families, local human rights activists say they are seeing an increase in child marriages, forced prostitution, and trafficking in women. Activists have also said that the practice of mut’ah, or temporary marriage, has grown since 2003 because of poverty and a resurgence of religious parties and tribal customs. Permissible under Shi’a Islam, mut’ah is a fixed-term contractual marriage usually involving a payment by the man to the wife during the specified period, and can lead in some cases to permanent marriage. In modern times, it has been used for example by men who move to a city on a temporary basis. However, this practice can lead to abuses. Impoverished and jobless widows and girls, often from displaced families, are being pressured into these types of contracts as a way to lessen their families’ poverty, according to women’s rights activists. More troubling, women’s rights groups in the south report that men working for local government, religious institutions, and charities use their positions to pressure widows to practice mut’ah in exchange for any charity or services. They are exploited for mut’ah (literally, “pleasure”) marriages by the very institutions that are supposed to be helping them.
As the tenth anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq approaches, the country’s transition to a functioning and sustainable democracy built on rule of law is far from accomplished. Iraq’s transition from a police state to a society based on respect for fundamental human rights depends in large part on whether Iraqi authorities will be able to adequately defend women’s rights and end the violations against women and girls that have so far continued with impunity.
While the effects of the US troop pullout by the end of 2011 remains to be seen, women and girls find themselves vulnerable again in the face of further insecurity and diminished international attention to their plight. To bolster women’s rights, the international community must continue providing financial and technical assistance to civil society organizations supporting women and girls who have suffered sexual violence, trafficking, or forced marriage, or who fear reprisals from their families in the form of honor killings. One of the few bright lights for women since 2003 that I have witnessed in different cities across Iraq has been the dramatic increase in women’s rights groups and female activists ceaselessly working to advocate for legislative reform and provide services to marginalized women.
However, it will be impossible for these activists to embark on a program of reform unilaterally. There is hope but only if the Iraqi government acts decisively as a partner for change. Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government has taken a series of positive steps in this respect. Most significantly, in June 2011, Kurdistan’s parliament passed the Family Violence Bill, which criminalizes forced and child marriages; the verbal, physical, and psychological abuse of girls and women; and female genital mutilation.
On the national level, Iraq’s central government must follow suit and adopt a two-pronged approach to legal reform. First, the government would provide a huge boost to women’s rights by amending the penal code and all other legislation to remove any law that discriminates against women, or allows mitigation for violent crimes against women on grounds of “honor.” The second necessary step is passing a law to combat human trafficking, in particular the trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Under this law, victims would not be punished further, but referred to social welfare agencies for financial assistance as well as health and social services.
The Iraqi government could further serve the cause of women’s rights by establishing or improving preventive and protection programs and facilities, including adequate shelters, for women at risk of violence or abuse. Facilitating widows’ access to government services and aid by removing burdensome documentation requirements would be another step in the right direction.
Perhaps most important, a change of mindset from top to bottom in Iraq’s government with regard to the role and value of women in society is essential, as is the need for justice to deter abusers. It should be unthinkable for a female victim to go to a police station in Iraq and hear the words spoken to Muna in Baghdad: “It is not up to us, we have nothing to do with your case.”
Samer Muscati is a researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division and a former journalist, whose work focuses on Iraq and on the United Arab Emirates. He is the author of two reports on Iraq, At a Crossroads (2011) and On Vulnerable Ground (2009). Before joining Human Rights Watch in 2009, he worked in Baghdad as an Iraqi government adviser. Muscati, who holds a law degree from the University of Toronto, also photographed Iraqi women demonstrators for the cover of this book.